[csg fall 2004] Exchange mail at Brown University

Molly Baird - Brown U - Exchange 2003

Migrating from an imap/pop service to Exchange. About 95% migrated.
Hosting about 12k users

Two 2-node clusterd Exchange mailbox servers
Four load-balanced Exchange front-end servers (OWA, IMAP, POP)
250 Gb total storage

Brown has a central Active Directory
- people container is totally separate from the departmental container that has machines and groups/lists.

Two kinds of databases in an exchange information store
mapi store (available to mapi clients)
direct access by imap, pop, OWA
on the fly conversion of content when accessed by the other kind of client

Exchange public folders

Not in heavy use at Brown, but some use - e.g. for storing vacation calendars, shared contacts, shared lists, collections of project files.

Converting shared IDs into shared mailboxes with ACLs.

sizing -

DB size based on wanting to recover single database based on backup needs.
Many small databases on each server (about a dozen)

Exchange costs:
1 FTE for migration and maaintenance
- One time costs:
-- migration 1.5 fte split between admin and tech duties
- license - Microsoft CAL license requred
- license: OS and Exchange sw - $11k
HW - four front end servers - $30k
HW: staff cluster - $60k
HW- Student cluster $60k
SAN storage - $70k
Provisioning changes - coincided with provisioning avehaul (automatic password creation and sync, print services, etc).

Total one-time cost: $231k

(by my math that's about $50/user/year just for hardware, based on a four-year life cycle)

Quotas - fac/staff 100Mb quotas, students 25 Mb

Students don't get MAPI access - pop, imap, or web client only

Have to recover an entire database to recover a single mailbox or folder.